NAME

perlebcdic - Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platforms

DESCRIPTION

An exploration of some of the issues facing Perl programmers on EBCDIC based computers. We do not cover localization, internationalization, or multi byte character set issues other than some discussion of UTF-8 and UTF-EBCDIC.

Portions that are still incomplete are marked with XXX.

COMMON CHARACTER CODE SETS

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a set of integers running from 0 to 127 (decimal) that imply character interpretation by the display and other system(s) of computers. The range 0..127 can be covered by setting the bits in a 7-bit binary digit, hence the set is sometimes referred to as a "7-bit ASCII". ASCII was described by the American National Standards Institute document ANSI X3.4-1986. It was also described by ISO 646:1991 (with localization for currency symbols). The full ASCII set is given in the table below as the first 128 elements. Languages that can be written adequately with the characters in ASCII include English, Hawaiian, Indonesian, Swahili and some Native American languages.

There are many character sets that extend the range of integers from 0..2**7-1 up to 2**8-1, or 8 bit bytes (octets if you prefer). One common one is the ISO 8859-1 character set.

ISO 8859

The ISO 8859-$n are a collection of character code sets from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) each of which adds characters to the ASCII set that are typically found in European languages many of which are based on the Roman, or Latin, alphabet.

Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1)

A particular 8-bit extension to ASCII that includes grave and acute accented Latin characters. Languages that can employ ISO 8859-1 include all the languages covered by ASCII as well as Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Dutch is covered albeit without the ij ligature. French is covered too but without the oe ligature. German can use ISO 8859-1 but must do so without German-style quotation marks. This set is based on Western European extensions to ASCII and is commonly encountered in world wide web work. In IBM character code set identification terminology ISO 8859-1 is also known as CCSID 819 (or sometimes 0819 or even 00819).

EBCDIC

The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code refers to a large collection of slightly different single and multi byte coded character sets that are different from ASCII or ISO 8859-1 and typically run on host computers. The EBCDIC encodings derive from 8 bit byte extensions of Hollerith punched card encodings. The layout on the cards was such that high bits were set for the upper and lower case alphabet characters [a-z] and [A-Z], but there were gaps within each latin alphabet range.

Some IBM EBCDIC character sets may be known by character code set identification numbers (CCSID numbers) or code page numbers. Leading zero digits in CCSID numbers within this document are insignificant. E.g. CCSID 0037 may be referred to as 37 in places.

13 variant characters

Among IBM EBCDIC character code sets there are 13 characters that are often mapped to different integer values. Those characters are known as the 13 "variant" characters and are:

\ [ ] { } ^ ~ ! # | $ @ `

0037

Character code set ID 0037 is a mapping of the ASCII plus Latin-1 characters (i.e. ISO 8859-1) to an EBCDIC set. 0037 is used in North American English locales on the OS/400 operating system that runs on AS/400 computers. CCSID 37 differs from ISO 8859-1 in 237 places, in other words they agree on only 19 code point values.

1047

Character code set ID 1047 is also a mapping of the ASCII plus Latin-1 characters (i.e. ISO 8859-1) to an EBCDIC set. 1047 is used under Unix System Services for OS/390 or z/OS, and OpenEdition for VM/ESA. CCSID 1047 differs from CCSID 0037 in eight places.

POSIX-BC

The EBCDIC code page in use on Siemens' BS2000 system is distinct from 1047 and 0037. It is identified below as the POSIX-BC set.

Unicode code points versus EBCDIC code points

In Unicode terminology a code point is the number assigned to a character: for example, in EBCDIC the character "A" is usually assigned the number 193. In Unicode the character "A" is assigned the number 65. This causes a problem with the semantics of the pack/unpack "U", which are supposed to pack Unicode code points to characters and back to numbers. The problem is: which code points to use for code points less than 256? (for 256 and over there's no problem: Unicode code points are used) In EBCDIC, for the low 256 the EBCDIC code points are used. This means that the equivalences

will hold. (If Unicode code points were applied consistently over all the possible code points, pack("U",ord("A")) would in EBCDIC equal A with acute or chr(101), and unpack("U", "A") would equal 65, or non-breaking space, not 193, or ord "A".)

Remaining Perl Unicode problems in EBCDIC

Many of the remaining seem to be related to case-insensitive matching: for example, /[\x{131}]/ (LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I) does not match "I" case-insensitively, as it should under Unicode. (The match succeeds in ASCII-derived platforms.)

The extensions Unicode::Collate and Unicode::Normalized are not supported under EBCDIC, likewise for the encoding pragma.

Unicode and UTF

UTF is a Unicode Transformation Format. UTF-8 is a Unicode conforming representation of the Unicode standard that looks very much like ASCII. UTF-EBCDIC is an attempt to represent Unicode characters in an EBCDIC transparent manner.

Using Encode

Starting from Perl 5.8 you can use the standard new module Encode to translate from EBCDIC to Latin-1 code points

to get two files containing "Hello World!\n" in ASCII, CP 37 EBCDIC, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) (in this example identical to ASCII) respective UTF-EBCDIC (in this example identical to normal EBCDIC). See the documentation of Encode::PerlIO for details.

As the PerlIO layer uses raw IO (bytes) internally, all this totally ignores things like the type of your filesystem (ASCII or EBCDIC).

SINGLE OCTET TABLES

The following tables list the ASCII and Latin 1 ordered sets including the subsets: C0 controls (0..31), ASCII graphics (32..7e), delete (7f), C1 controls (80..9f), and Latin-1 (a.k.a. ISO 8859-1) (a0..ff). In the table non-printing control character names as well as the Latin 1 extensions to ASCII have been labelled with character names roughly corresponding to The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 albeit with substitutions such as s/LATIN// and s/VULGAR// in all cases, s/CAPITAL LETTER// in some cases, and s/SMALL LETTER ([A-Z])/\l$1/ in some other cases (the charnames pragma names unfortunately do not list explicit names for the C0 or C1 control characters). The "names" of the C1 control set (128..159 in ISO 8859-1) listed here are somewhat arbitrary. The differences between the 0037 and 1047 sets are flagged with ***. The differences between the 1047 and POSIX-BC sets are flagged with ###. All ord() numbers listed are decimal. If you would rather see this table listing octal values then run the table (that is, the pod version of this document since this recipe may not work with a pod2_other_format translation) through:

Obviously the first of these will fail to distinguish most ASCII machines from either a CCSID 0037, a 1047, or a POSIX-BC EBCDIC machine since "\r" eq chr(13) under all of those coded character sets. But note too that because "\n" is chr(13) and "\r" is chr(10) on the MacIntosh (which is an ASCII machine) the second $is_ascii test will lead to trouble there.

To determine whether or not perl was built under an EBCDIC code page you can use the Config module like so:

use Config;
$is_ebcdic = $Config{'ebcdic'} eq 'define';

CONVERSIONS

tr///

In order to convert a string of characters from one character set to another a simple list of numbers, such as in the right columns in the above table, along with perl's tr/// operator is all that is needed. The data in the table are in ASCII order hence the EBCDIC columns provide easy to use ASCII to EBCDIC operations that are also easily reversed.

For example, to convert ASCII to code page 037 take the output of the second column from the output of recipe 0 (modified to add \\ characters) and use it in tr/// like so:

Similarly one could take the output of the third column from recipe 0 to obtain a $cp_1047 table. The fourth column of the output from recipe 0 could provide a $cp_posix_bc table suitable for transcoding as well.

iconv

XPG operability often implies the presence of an iconv utility available from the shell or from the C library. Consult your system's documentation for information on iconv.

On OS/390 or z/OS see the iconv(1) manpage. One way to invoke the iconv shell utility from within perl would be to:

For other perl based conversion options see the Convert::* modules on CPAN.

C RTL

The OS/390 and z/OS C run time libraries provide _atoe() and _etoa() functions.

OPERATOR DIFFERENCES

The .. range operator treats certain character ranges with care on EBCDIC machines. For example the following array will have twenty six elements on either an EBCDIC machine or an ASCII machine:

@alphabet = ('A'..'Z'); # $#alphabet == 25

The bitwise operators such as & ^ | may return different results when operating on string or character data in a perl program running on an EBCDIC machine than when run on an ASCII machine. Here is an example adapted from the one in perlop:

An interesting property of the 32 C0 control characters in the ASCII table is that they can "literally" be constructed as control characters in perl, e.g. (chr(0) eq "\c@")(chr(1) eq "\cA"), and so on. Perl on EBCDIC machines has been ported to take "\c@" to chr(0) and "\cA" to chr(1) as well, but the thirty three characters that result depend on which code page you are using. The table below uses the character names from the previous table but with substitutions such as s/START OF/S.O./; s/END OF /E.O./; s/TRANSMISSION/TRANS./; s/TABULATION/TAB./; s/VERTICAL/VERT./; s/HORIZONTAL/HORIZ./; s/DEVICE CONTROL/D.C./; s/SEPARATOR/SEP./; s/NEGATIVE ACKNOWLEDGE/NEG. ACK./;. The POSIX-BC and 1047 sets are identical throughout this range and differ from the 0037 set at only one spot (21 decimal). Note that the LINE FEED character may be generated by "\cJ" on ASCII machines but by "\cU" on 1047 or POSIX-BC machines and cannot be generated as a "\c.letter." control character on 0037 machines. Note also that "\c\\" maps to two characters not one.

One must be careful with scalars and strings that are passed to print that contain ASCII encodings. One common place for this to occur is in the output of the MIME type header for CGI script writing. For example, many perl programming guides recommend something similar to:

print "Content-type:\ttext/html\015\012\015\012";
# this may be wrong on EBCDIC

Under the IBM OS/390 USS Web Server or WebSphere on z/OS for example you should instead write that as:

print "Content-type:\ttext/html\r\n\r\n"; # OK for DGW et alia

That is because the translation from EBCDIC to ASCII is done by the web server in this case (such code will not be appropriate for the Macintosh however). Consult your web server's documentation for further details.

printf()

The formats that can convert characters to numbers and vice versa will be different from their ASCII counterparts when executed on an EBCDIC machine. Examples include:

printf("%c%c%c",193,194,195); # prints ABC

sort()

EBCDIC sort results may differ from ASCII sort results especially for mixed case strings. This is discussed in more detail below.

sprintf()

See the discussion of printf() above. An example of the use of sprintf would be:

$CAPITAL_LETTER_A = sprintf("%c",193);

unpack()

See the discussion of pack() above.

REGULAR EXPRESSION DIFFERENCES

As of perl 5.005_03 the letter range regular expression such as [A-Z] and [a-z] have been especially coded to not pick up gap characters. For example, characters such as ô o WITH CIRCUMFLEX that lie between I and J would not be matched by the regular expression range /[H-K]/. This works in the other direction, too, if either of the range end points is explicitly numeric: [\x89-\x91] will match \x8e, even though \x89 is i and \x91 is j, and \x8e is a gap character from the alphabetic viewpoint.

If you do want to match the alphabet gap characters in a single octet regular expression try matching the hex or octal code such as /\313/ on EBCDIC or /\364/ on ASCII machines to have your regular expression match o WITH CIRCUMFLEX.

Another construct to be wary of is the inappropriate use of hex or octal constants in regular expressions. Consider the following set of subs:

The above would be adequate if the concern was only with numeric code points. However, the concern may be with characters rather than code points and on an EBCDIC machine it may be desirable for constructs such as if (is_print_ascii("A")) {print "A is a printable character\n";} to print out the expected message. One way to represent the above collection of character classification subs that is capable of working across the four coded character sets discussed in this document is as follows:

Although that form may run into trouble in network transit (due to the presence of 8 bit characters) or on non ISO-Latin character sets.

SOCKETS

Most socket programming assumes ASCII character encodings in network byte order. Exceptions can include CGI script writing under a host web server where the server may take care of translation for you. Most host web servers convert EBCDIC data to ISO-8859-1 or Unicode on output.

SORTING

One big difference between ASCII based character sets and EBCDIC ones are the relative positions of upper and lower case letters and the letters compared to the digits. If sorted on an ASCII based machine the two letter abbreviation for a physician comes before the two letter for drive, that is:

The property of lower case before uppercase letters in EBCDIC is even carried to the Latin 1 EBCDIC pages such as 0037 and 1047. An example would be that Ë E WITH DIAERESIS (203) comes before ë e WITH DIAERESIS (235) on an ASCII machine, but the latter (83) comes before the former (115) on an EBCDIC machine. (Astute readers will note that the upper case version of ß SMALL LETTER SHARP S is simply "SS" and that the upper case version of ÿ y WITH DIAERESIS is not in the 0..255 range but it is at U+x0178 in Unicode, or "\x{178}" in a Unicode enabled Perl).

The sort order will cause differences between results obtained on ASCII machines versus EBCDIC machines. What follows are some suggestions on how to deal with these differences.

Ignore ASCII vs. EBCDIC sort differences.

This is the least computationally expensive strategy. It may require some user education.

MONO CASE then sort data.

In order to minimize the expense of mono casing mixed test try to tr/// towards the character set case most employed within the data. If the data are primarily UPPERCASE non Latin 1 then apply tr/[a-z]/[A-Z]/ then sort(). If the data are primarily lowercase non Latin 1 then apply tr/[A-Z]/[a-z]/ before sorting. If the data are primarily UPPERCASE and include Latin-1 characters then apply:

then sort(). Do note however that such Latin-1 manipulation does not address the ÿ y WITH DIAERESIS character that will remain at code point 255 on ASCII machines, but 223 on most EBCDIC machines where it will sort to a place less than the EBCDIC numerals. With a Unicode enabled Perl you might try:

tr/^?/\x{178}/;

The strategy of mono casing data before sorting does not preserve the case of the data and may not be acceptable for that reason.

Convert, sort data, then re convert.

This is the most expensive proposition that does not employ a network connection.

Perform sorting on one type of machine only.

This strategy can employ a network connection. As such it would be computationally expensive.

TRANSFORMATION FORMATS

There are a variety of ways of transforming data with an intra character set mapping that serve a variety of purposes. Sorting was discussed in the previous section and a few of the other more popular mapping techniques are discussed next.

URL decoding and encoding

Note that some URLs have hexadecimal ASCII code points in them in an attempt to overcome character or protocol limitation issues. For example the tilde character is not on every keyboard hence a URL of the form:

http://www.pvhp.com/~pvhp/

may also be expressed as either of:

http://www.pvhp.com/%7Epvhp/
http://www.pvhp.com/%7epvhp/

where 7E is the hexadecimal ASCII code point for '~'. Here is an example of decoding such a URL under CCSID 1047:

where a more complete solution would split the URL into components and apply a full s/// substitution only to the appropriate parts.

In the remaining examples a @e2a or @a2e array may be employed but the assignment will not be shown explicitly. For code page 1047 you could use the @a2e_1047 or @e2a_1047 arrays just shown.

uu encoding and decoding

The u template to pack() or unpack() will render EBCDIC data in EBCDIC characters equivalent to their ASCII counterparts. For example, the following will print "Yes indeed\n" on either an ASCII or EBCDIC computer:

Caesarian ciphers

The practice of shifting an alphabet one or more characters for encipherment dates back thousands of years and was explicitly detailed by Gaius Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars text. A single alphabet shift is sometimes referred to as a rotation and the shift amount is given as a number $n after the string 'rot' or "rot$n". Rot0 and rot26 would designate identity maps on the 26 letter English version of the Latin alphabet. Rot13 has the interesting property that alternate subsequent invocations are identity maps (thus rot13 is its own non-trivial inverse in the group of 26 alphabet rotations). Hence the following is a rot13 encoder and decoder that will work on ASCII and EBCDIC machines:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
while(<>){
tr/n-za-mN-ZA-M/a-zA-Z/;
print;
}

In one-liner form:

perl -ne 'tr/n-za-mN-ZA-M/a-zA-Z/;print'

Hashing order and checksums

To the extent that it is possible to write code that depends on hashing order there may be differences between hashes as stored on an ASCII based machine and hashes stored on an EBCDIC based machine. XXX

I18N AND L10N

Internationalization(I18N) and localization(L10N) are supported at least in principle even on EBCDIC machines. The details are system dependent and discussed under the "OS ISSUES" in perlebcdic section below.

MULTI OCTET CHARACTER SETS

Perl may work with an internal UTF-EBCDIC encoding form for wide characters on EBCDIC platforms in a manner analogous to the way that it works with the UTF-8 internal encoding form on ASCII based platforms.

Legacy multi byte EBCDIC code pages XXX.

OS ISSUES

There may be a few system dependent issues of concern to EBCDIC Perl programmers.

OS/400

PASE

The PASE environment is runtime environment for OS/400 that can run executables built for PowerPC AIX in OS/400, see perlos400. PASE is ASCII-based, not EBCDIC-based as the ILE.

IFS access

XXX.

OS/390, z/OS

Perl runs under Unix Systems Services or USS.

chcp

chcp is supported as a shell utility for displaying and changing one's code page. See also chcp.

dataset access

For sequential data set access try:

my @ds_records = `cat //DSNAME`;

or:

my @ds_records = `cat //'HLQ.DSNAME'`;

See also the OS390::Stdio module on CPAN.

OS/390, z/OS iconv

iconv is supported as both a shell utility and a C RTL routine. See also the iconv(1) and iconv(3) manual pages.

locales

On OS/390 or z/OS see locale for information on locales. The L10N files are in /usr/nls/locale. $Config{d_setlocale} is 'define' on OS/390 or z/OS.

VM/ESA?

XXX.

POSIX-BC?

XXX.

BUGS

This pod document contains literal Latin 1 characters and may encounter translation difficulties. In particular one popular nroff implementation was known to strip accented characters to their unaccented counterparts while attempting to view this document through the pod2man program (for example, you may see a plain y rather than one with a diaeresis as in ÿ). Another nroff truncated the resultant manpage at the first occurrence of 8 bit characters.

Not all shells will allow multiple -e string arguments to perl to be concatenated together properly as recipes 0, 2, 4, 5, and 6 might seem to imply.

HISTORY

15 April 2001: added UTF-8 and UTF-EBCDIC to main table, pvhp.

AUTHOR

Peter Prymmer pvhp@best.com wrote this in 1999 and 2000 with CCSID 0819 and 0037 help from Chris Leach and André Pirard A.Pirard@ulg.ac.be as well as POSIX-BC help from Thomas Dorner Thomas.Dorner@start.de. Thanks also to Vickie Cooper, Philip Newton, William Raffloer, and Joe Smith. Trademarks, registered trademarks, service marks and registered service marks used in this document are the property of their respective owners.